Meta and Google are cutting staff
wsj.com
wsj.com
Not only is it graded on a curve but to prevent ratings inflation there are quotas for each ratings bucket. Many deny this, even when presented with concrete proof that such quotas exist (but were called "performance targets"). This itself would be fine except that negative ratings have a target percentage of ~10%. This includes regrettable losses and ratings below Meets All Expectations.
Such targets are enforced at a reasonably high level, typically at director or higher over an org of 100-150+ employees.
Why is that bad? Because it creates a hugely toxic environment. Why? Because such directors and VPs will demand their managers find sufficient "low" performers to meet their targets.
The other aspect to this is that all of these ratings are essentially bullshit anyway. Why? Because it's a popularity contest. If your manager and director likes you, you'll pretty much always get a good rating. If they don't, you won't. The exact same set of facts can be used to argue ratings pretty much +/- 1 bucket, possibly more.
Stack ranking and related schemes are so obviously going to be gamed, will definitely measure something other than the nominal thing, and will gum up the works. It's one thing to have a Hunger-Games-style hiring process. Bad as that is, there's an expectation that once you've passed those trials—once you're hired—that you can then devote your time to building things or leading a team that builds things.
But when it extends into quarterly or annual reviews, where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals and doing useful work. Now you have to spend time managing your image, making sure you don't piss off the wrong peer, and choosing assignments that are trendy.
Companies try to avoid all of that by adding even more complexity to the review process. More layers to prevent favoritism, more concrete metrics to sidestep subjectivity, a longer list of metrics to mitigate any one of them being over-weighted.
This just means more time and attention is stolen from productive work, and directed instead toward image management and politics.
The goal of corporate employees usually is not maximizing profit. If it were, things like private equity, LBOs, and shareholder lawsuits would not be necessary. Rather, the goal of organization-man is maintenance of the hierarchy. Why? Because people who aren't interested in this goal either quit and take jobs outside of the corporate world (like consultant, therapist, small business owner, etc.) or they circulate freely throughout many different companies and rely on up-leveling at the interview stage to get raises and promotions.
With this goal, all the stack ranking, annual reviews, politics and image maintenance makes sense. For there to be a hierarchy, there must be people at the bottom of the hierarchy. There must also be a pathway to the top of the hierarchy, lest people tire of the game and quit. Therefore, people seeking to preserve the hierarchy will create processes to ensure some people are defined as needing improvement, and others are defined as being worthy of promotion and upward mobility.
The folks who are purely interested in maximizing profit usually enter finance and become hedge fund managers, where they have a small staff (largely dispensable, other than themselves) but outsize influence on markets, and can keep 20% of their profits (100% if trading their own capital) for themselves.
At the end of the day even upper management doesn't matter. This is about Owners and Workers and everything in between is just fluff. The $300k - $400k these engineers are making is a rounding error. Turning middle management into cannibals so that one day they might reach slightly higher management is exactly what is supposed to happen, because it means they are willing to kill for the owners.
Intelligence isn't a spectrum, it's an infinite-dimensional space. Someone can be smart on one axis and a dunce on infinity-minus-one other axes. Every genius ever born was almost certainly mediocre at nearly everything outside their expertise.
We assume that the people implementing stack ranking have good incentives.
At one of my jobs, my manager blurted out what we have all suspected about Scrum. It is valuable to generate a neat numerical progress report for the guy above. It has no other value.
My manager doesn't give a shit about achieving anything either. He is doing the same gaming we are.
None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth.
Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation.
This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.
I didn't realize it was this bad. This is awful.
First, it’s important to understand that managers are held to outcomes. If a manager retains low performers because “they’re friends”, over time they’ll find themselves with a low performing team and it will be visible in their results. At that stage they are now at the bottom of their manager’s stack-ranking process. Retain and promote your low-performing friends at your peril.
Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent, perhaps those managers will never be held to account. But if you hold that view there’s no reason to believe anything is functional, let alone promotions, and I’d explore other employment opportunities if you can.
Respectfully, I disagree.
First, let me point out that when I say "popularity" I don't mean friends necessarily in the nepotism sense (in response to your later point). "Popularity" is a reductive term but still a relatively accurate one. What's really going on here is the intangible factors lead other around you to interpret the same set of facts charitably or not almost arbitrarily.
A big factor here is similarity in terms of demographic factors and background. This so often gets wrapped up "culture fit", which itself can be a euphemism for more problematic biases.
The example I like to give is this: a person may work on a project for a half that never ships. It may not even produce an MVP. Given this set of facts you will people who will say "we learned a lot and will take those learnings into future projects" all the way to "this team failed to deliver a prototype and as such we canned the project".
What's driving this are social factors.
Managers are subject to the same social forces that drive this interpretation. A given manager may get credit for dealing with reports that aren't necessarily bad enough to be exited but would otherwise be a headache for someone else in the org. Or that manager may be blamed for their team being perceived as low-performing even though they're given projects doomed to fail (eg under-resourced).
It's also worth noting that with any form of stack ranking or performance quotas, another factor that comes into play is horse-trading. That is, different managers are competing for a limited pool of ratings. You will find that a manager has decided someone should be promoted and that report will find themselves high on stack ranking as a result. There's an implicit quid pro quo here because other managers can get your support (as a manager) when one of their reports gets put up for promotion.
> Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent
It's not competence. It's biases masquerading as objective determinations and an implicit over-reliance on social cues and factors all while managers have incentives that may come at the expense of those of their reports.
How could this be fixed? If true, what would we expect to see, versus its not being true?
“there’s no reason to believe anything is functional” should be “you don’t believe in your manager.” Good managers divorce moral edict from feelings. Good managers know they don’t get to define what functional means.
Sure you can buy ad$... but are you prepared to buy the 30% fake impressions to fake people we require?
The fact that both systems / strategies were developed by the same group of people is for sure the "why" behind these cuts.
Got a good chuckle out of this.
My experience with calibration at multiple companies is it's where you realize not only does your review depend on how happy you make your manager, but how politically savvy your manager is coupled with how much you were able to impress the people on the calibration committee.
It also gives your manager a nice out if you work hard, but they don't quite like you. All they have to do is not fight for you in calibration and you'll never be able to get much beyond a "meets expectations" rating.
It was more honest and straightforward than what silicon valley and Big Tech pretends to do. It is all ranking in some ways. Everything is. If you remove the facade, fundamentally you have a limited resource and you want to reward people that make the company successful. I don't see anything wrong with that. Doing anything else is wrong and unfair IMO.
I didn't say that and I didn't imply that. Anyways, rewarding (positive reinforcement) is mutually exclusive to punishment (negative reinforcement). Rewarding should be encouraged, otherwise, I have zero motivation to do better. There are many other companies that would value me more and I would not stay there.
Extreme meritocracy is idealistic, and I understand that cannot be achieved easily and there is always politics/networking that plays a role. But it does exist and I've been a beneficiary of it.
Take the manager's word for it and go all in on nepotism?
What's the better solution?
Note: 'in a standard way across teams'. You have jumped directly to 'can't be measured at all in any circumstances'
How to grade that into any kind of ranking, in a standard way, is seemingly not likely given how subjective the difficulty of a code base is. This also completely elides the clever and best engineers that find ways to simplify and/or avoid solving problems entirely. Further, a team that built a crap pile of bad code, but know it pretty well could seem really productive just because they have built for themselves some job security. Then compound all this with measuring the utility of what was produced.
Also, any investors out there might hear “one time restructuring charge” in the quarterly results when they talk P&L which will affect the bottom line.
Geez, I mean there are decent managers who do rate on performance and not just buddy-buddy stuff. Frankly I'd expect to be trusted with my reviews of people under me.
I saved my team a couple of times over but pissed off a manager in the process. My performance review had multiple contradictions praising me and admonishing me for the same things (being a good mentor but not spending any time onboarding new team members, etc). I left rather than deal with the gaslighting that was all but certain to ramp up.
Graded in the context of peers’ performance does not imply that they sort employees by performance.
But well, stack ranking is not only about sorting (the name is a lie), it's about placing people in fixed sized cohorts. The real question is if there is a limitation on the number of raises or a minimum on the number of people treated as "low performant".
You do get to see the average size of cohorts, and you will need to explain why your team doesn’t meet them - for example if the entire team project is going exceedingly well, or the team is really made out if a lot of extraordinarily talented people - then you can argue why you have more than the average rate of excellent rankings.
Anyway, even if it honestly for "extraordinarily talented" people, that's still stupid stack-ranking.
The curve determines rating and compensation, influences promotion decisions, projects people get to work on and what opportunities come their way. The seems like a sort to me given that budget and project opportunities are fixed in many places.
EDIT: It sounds like at least some people are claiming that Meta has an internal policy that X% of your engineers under you are supposed to be given "Meets Most Expectations" ratings, which would also be pretty close to stack ranking (if at least allowing for some management leniency) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32930370
With large enough populations you see fairly consistent statistical information across time. Little fluctuations even out. So at org sizes of, say, 500 people you'll see pretty consistent ratings distributions between cycles. This is where you get the "we have a roughly expected ratings distribution." If you've deviated far from this then it means either that your org is training people on the evaluation process incorrectly or there is some other cause of a weird distribution. When something doesn't match, people simply investigate for an alternative solution.
What people seem to be frightened of is when somebody says to a manager of 10 people "hey you've got too many high ratings, drop some." Google and Meta are massive companies so I suspect that this happens somewhere but I've never even got the scent of this happening from my position at Google. I've had cycles where 100% of my team was in the top 20% of ratings without anybody raising an eyebrow.
A team of 20 people may have no low performers. An org of 400 probably has a couple, at some point the law of large numbers does really start to apply, and you're no longer in competition with the people you're working with on the daily.
If one member of your two-pizza team is going to get fired each year, it makes sense to throw someone under the bus on the reg. If one member of your 100 person org is going to get fired each year, that strategy doesn't make sense.
They are still super atheletes, but they are judged against other NBA teammates, not average professional basketballer in the world.
I wouldn't want to work somewhere at FB scale that doesn't grade you on the curve of other engineers in your department and level, once your departments are large enough that's exactly how it should work.
What's problematic is forcefully defining X percent as being low performing, the comparison to peers is a misused kernel of benefit.
BTW "meets most" likely doesn't sound too bad to non-Metamates. Internally it's a pretty bad mark on your record. It doesn't directly relate to being fired but a ton of people quit when they receive it. I view it as sort of a "pre-PIP" state.
(* Managers/directors will say it's only a suggestion but nobody really believes that. I'm sure management themselves are frowned upon for not having enough MM under them.)
The kind of newspeak I've heard from multiple friends and former coworkers that ended up at FB/Meta at some point. Well, the ones that didn't fall into the cult of Mark.
It might be because I'm getting older but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to puke. The co-optation of language to exude an aura of friendliness is absolutely disgusting.
Hmmm this doesn’t sound like the Facebook I worked at
The curve is defined by the organization. They can carefully examine it, refine it, backtrack how it's performed... or you can have someone clueless hear that so and so company fires Y percent, so let's tweak the curve until Y percent are at the "extremities"
there are good (usually small) teams doing interesting and professionally fulfilling work that's not really common elsewhere. (things that come due to "hyperscale". a-a-and, unfortunately, in this regard all big corps are alike. so if you want to do something like that, then your best bet is a corp like FB. though of course there are smaller niche companies for everything, so just because of some niche don't rush to big co-s.)
I guess they are hiring at some BUs and firing at others?
The options seem to be:
* Cut risky or underperforming products or teams and focus company resources on the products and teams that are doing well.
* Or cut staff across the board, leaving all teams struggling to succeed with fewer resources.
The first option seems wiser. "More wood behind fewer arrows", as the saying goes.
Seems contradictory to many modern interview process opinions that low performers introduce a net negative effect.
* losing the low performer in this context means you lose a head count. If you keep the low performer during hard times, you can hope to get them backfilled when the economic environment gets better * there are often more work to do than you have resources for: if as an EM, you have to deal with PM who refuse to adapt to capacity, you can simply assign the low perfomers to the projects you don't care about. * etc.
once you reach a certain size, those issues happen in pretty much any organization in my experience.
Even at the worst companies I’ve been at I have never seen anyone rewarded for behaving this way.
The unintended side effect is that it punishes risk takers and destroys innovation culture.
Do American executives, investors, and start up owners not have the guts for even a moderate stock price drop? I guess the reaction is to cut staff, or threaten to, when there is a whiff of negativity. Fuckin weak.
When the hiring market is tight you might keep them on longer and try to mentor them up to par, but when the hiring market shifts and there are a lot of great candidates on the market it's better to let the underperformers go and re-fill those jobs with great performers who are back on the market for whatever reason.
They're still hiring. This is more like cycling out hires that didn't work AND some collateral employees who unfortunately got lumped into those teams and cancelled projects. Often, the great employees who get "laid off" are quickly scooped up by other teams within the company who need their talent. It's not good business to let great engineers go.
I see - if they are cycling out the lower performers and hire recently laid off people on the market for a bargain, then that kind of makes sense, assuming they are not in a hiring freeze.
The strategy probably works regardless of macro economic conditions assuming you let go of "lemons" at a greater rate than you hire them, but it seems easier when the market isn't being flooded. You could maybe argue that layoffs at other companies are reducing the proportion of lemons, but it's not clear to me.
I think reducing headcount gives an immediate outlook of lower expenses without affecting revenue in the medium term. Tons of employees at these companies aren't working on projects that will have monetary significance within several years if ever.
They don't only hire recently laid off people. Most people who apply do that for other reasons I think. Also, maybe eg Google s recruiting accuracy is better than other companies lay-off accuracy
I suspect that despite being rich, headcount is expensive. If the median googler makes 300k, it probably costs Google 500k to employ. A team of 100 is $50M! A news article claimed google hired 10k people in Q2, so that'd be $5B in commitment (probably actually less, but on that scale). Doesn't take many quarters of that sort of growth to outpace income.
The median googler does not make 300k. The median Google engineer/manager in the US might make 300k but Google hires plenty of people in other roles and in other countries.
Actual number was 295,884
I chose a round number. Wasn’t too far off.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-alphabet-meta-and-other-s-...
This isn't about stock prices, this is about the strength of the underlying business.
Google's net income went from $16.4B Q1 to $16B Q2. Such an insane amount of money.
[Q1]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings...
[Q2]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings...
FB/Meta is the same- They have made some low key progress with Groups, have essentially wiped out craigslist as a marketplace, made some great strategic investments like WhatsApp, and essentially cut their potential replacements off at the knees by quickly copying snapchat and to some extent tik-tok, but Meta also seems poised to throw billions and billions of dollars into this Metaverse furnace, and I just don't see that working out.
I say this as a shareholder of both firms, that I have held since their IPOs or shortly thereafter.
[1] Take their home products for instance. There are nNest protects (smoke detectors/motion detectors), thermostats, cameras and doorbells... its an absolute layup to turn this into a security system far better than the crap ADT pushes. Yet... they just haven't for over 10 years now. And then they try to force a shitty subscription on you to use their cloud features that are really worthless, and have cut off APIs to third parties so I can no longer have my doorbell play through my Sonos. Its kind of maddening to watch.
As an employee, shareholders have to remember that sometimes stock prices go down, instead of hoping for cost cutting via layoffs.
Shareholders have had it good for a long time, especially during covid, with stock prices higher now then before the pandemic. Time to pay back karma.
Check my post history and you will see I wholly agree that stock price is an irrelevant metric.
much less uncertain than any other companies IMO. They're printing money.
In april they held a private concer featuring lizzo, then in july tell employees to increase productivity.
From lizzo to layoffs in two months.
Google has 3x more people today than when I worked there, and those people are working on the same products as back then. There must be some point which it no longer makes sense to hire more people.
The market is more volatile and less rational.
But why should they? If staff being cut is low performers, as companies stated, then it would be equivalent to burning money for no reason.
And why would they need justification? They don’t owe anyone permanent sinecures.
In reality that’s not what happens. Instead you get rid of teams, roles or high cost individuals. Why? Because it is much easier to deal with the work the let go individuals are doing and it impacts morale less.
I never saw a stack ranked layoff. The closest was demanding teams all lose someone. But that leaves teams with really good people getting rid of good people and teams full of dogs retaining them.
It also sucks for the employee, a PIP is really stressful not knowing what will happen next, will you get fired, should you start looking for a new job.
In addition, the PIP can take months to get to the finish. Maybe even six months in some cases.
A layoff takes way less time, but it does suck for the employee. I don't know which is worse. But if you have a good employer, you still might be able to transfer to another part of the company. Being on a PIP usually means your only choice is looking outside the company for a new job.
Layoffs always hit good and low performers, there is no way it can't. But if a company wants to get rid of a number of low performers at the same time, PIPs are not the way to go.
But with a layoff it's really hard to prove the layoff was targeted unless everyone in the layoff happens to be part of the same protected class.
If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.
More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager.
if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done.
does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place.
I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers.
It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
"Soft coaching" instead of a PIP.
PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories.
Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around.
The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team.
These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
Relevant to the top-level topic here, that's why many managers welcome environments in which the barrier drops for cutting their worst employees. It's nice to be able to do that, when the whole company is going through it, without bringing scrutiny down on your team (and you, specifically, as someone who potentially made a bad hire).
It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.
No, this thread:
> Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing.
...is specifically about this quote from the article:
> Separately, the company’s head of engineering issued a call for managers to identify employees who were coasting and place them on remediation plans as a prelude to their termination.
It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.
For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.
And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.
I agree with due diligence, but the “frame of mind” argument is way to subjective.
What if, hear me out, in their opinion it’s me who refuses get in their frame of mind or meet them in the middle?
When you said you hate others who won't come over to your point of view. How many feel similiar that you won't come over to theirs?
1. Very unlikely. Which means they're lying.
2. They are incompetent for keeping people that are slacking
If people are truly just slacking off then they should be let go as part of the normal business process. This focused effort to get leaner suggests that there are many known slackers that they were OK with up to this point.
There is really no reason to call people slackers even if it's true. They should have went the patreon route of saying they fucked up and hired too many people into roles that didn't provide as much value as they need.
Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.
If they entered agreement (no matter legal form), that led company to believe that they will dedicate full time equivalent to given company and then did the same with another company, and charge both for full time, then it's obvious scam. It's simply beyond mental capacity of regular human being to carry out such contract.
People tend to rationalize latter one, but they will end on bad side of the layoffs, because it's simply unsustainable to pay full compensation for half-time work.
I think the executive getting rid of their usual fake friendly corporate talk, reflecting the degree how bad their bottom line is hurt.
I mean, sure there might be people not giving their best. But most people want to do work, want their work to be meaningful, and will generally do the right thing if guided correctly. The number of "slackers" who try to get by with no/0 effort is small, no way it could be large enough to meaningfully affect the bottomline.
Nothing is wrong doing it, we are following the money as we should.
Just neither empathy or loyalty is relevant to me, not reliable both ways.
The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away.
So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.
I have to say this is a sort of hilarious newspeak framing of layoffs. "We're not laying you off, you just need to apply and get accepted for a job or else you're terminated." OK, so I was a job-haver, now I'm a job-seeker... but at least I haven't been laid off!
==> It's at the very least a paid job search. (If you only look internally during that time, you're doing it wrong). Please do talk to people who've experienced actual layoffs how that's a comparatively very cushy alternative.
And let's not forget that an internal transfer is usually significantly easier than actually finding a new job.
But sure, it's "newspeak".
"Pay and benefits for 30 days while you look for a job" this is called "garden leave," a severance package could also cover this. If my position is terminated & I'm paid out two months salary and they continue covering my insurance for 60 days, that's great, but I'm still terminated.
I'm not against this policy, I'm not even against layoffs in all cases. Sometimes you hire a lot, sometimes you cut, that's business. This policy does seem better than direct layoffs, but eliminating people's positions and making them apply for new jobs (with 30 days garden leave) is pretty damn near layoffs. What if no other teams have headcount, what would you call it then?
I was just commenting on the turn of phrase, not laying people off but 'terminating their positions and making them look for a new job.'
I think the idea of bell curving people and firing the bottom is extremely dumb, a form of decimation with similar results. It's a culture destroyer and invents many perverse incentives in the company that are counter productive to "make great products".
But ultimately I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to be authentically reviewed poorly and made to prove they should stay.
I was just commenting on the turn of phrase, not laying people off but 'terminating their positions and making them look for a new job' (which sounds pretty dang near being laid off with garden leave).
The term "layoffs" is obviously toxic, so companies go to lengths to avoid using that particular phrase, even when that's what seems to be happening. I've been at a company while this happened: lots of reductions in headcount over a short period but "we're not doing layoffs."
They should fire the people who are actually causing the problems. Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. They are also discouraged that facebook started deciding which friends are important to the user instead of letting the user pick. The people who implemented these ?features? should be the first to be fired.
Similarly, the reason everyone is walking away from Google is because the search is getting worse. Why? Because Google increasingly doesn't allow you to search for what actually exists, but instead what it thinks you should see. Fire the people who did this. Fire them because they are destroying your company.
I don't care if you don't, it's your wealth to lose, but I also know that's not who will be shouldering the burden of yet another recession. I could easily do this for every company: Netflix: it's the crappy political shows, Microsoft: it's the telemetry and continually slower product, Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products, Goldman Sachs: it's the bro/frat culture, Most Banks: it's the insulting fees, Amazon: it's the way you treat your warehouse staff: Most Fast Food: it's the price gouging Most Food companies: it's the annoying shrinkflation. Fire these people. They made you short term profits and now your brand is ruined and everyone hates you.
But instead they will fire the people who are actually doing their job, and keep all the executives and "thought leaders", or whatever, in their protected positions. I think everyone basically knows why everyone hates facebook and left. Just stop doing that, is what I'm getting at.
This is really disingenuous. They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot. Not exactly what I would call “intentionally slowing working products” but rather “reducing CPU power consumption to mitigate abrupt reboots to keep a reliable user experience”.
Granted, Apple was a bit shady by not documenting this and giving the user the option to toggle it, until they were “caught”.
Only after they have made it impossibly expensive to replace some lithium.
This is an incredibly disingenuous defense of their actions. Apple is fully trying to tie hardware refreshes to the cadence of should be battery refreshes and the frog has been so boiled that android devices realized it was more profitable to follow suit.
Apple is incredibly shady and there simply isnt a defense here.
I’m not sure how my comment was disingenuous
Do you really believe this? How does TikTok fit into this vision of the world that you have constructed? I agree with your premise but it seems like you have made a connection between two unrelated things:
1. People are less interested in Facebook
2. Facebook is a giant, ad serving, spy machine
These two can co-exist without a propositional relationship. Unfortunately the average consumer does not care about privacy in the same way that people in this forum do. For what it's worth people have explicitly told me that they enjoy targetted ads.
When you only get shown stuff that pisses you off, you’ll get some short-term high engagement at the cost of enjoyment. Ultimately, that gave the strong impression that Facebook is Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, so young people dropped out.
Young people were already leaving Facebook since the early 2010s because their parents were all making accounts, making it less of a "safe" place to express themselves, and all the moms and grandmas just got left there. So Facebook's core, active user demographic became an older generation that skews more conservative, so the outrage porn that circulates there leans in that direction.
Whereas every other mainstream platform on the internet has the young people who are more liberal and hate the older generation, so the outrage porn shared around there is about how everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and how a straight white guy said something fatphobic. And if you're a person into that kind of stuff, that's what your Tiktok feed will be. It's certainly not "happy" unless you train the algorithm to only show you that.
It's 2 flavors of equally stupid anger bait to get people refreshing their feed all day. But it's certainly not that people have collectively decided they want happier news feeds. Quite the opposite.
In my experience, some non-trivial amount of these cost-control measures is about signaling. I worked in Japan for a large company that allowed employees to ride in first class (Green Car) on the Narita Express when traveling internationally for business; that went away during a period of belt-tightening. Saved a whole $15 each way.
Your butcher isn't too concerned about whether the chickens like the decor in their cage.
Users may not be Facebook's customers, but they are the product. It's hard to attract customers when your product is shrinking, and declining in quality (i.e. skewing older and therefor less appealing to advertisers)
This feels like the megacorp version of when a company is caring how much money stocking cola in the company fridge is costing. Which is a good barometer that it’s time to bail in a small company.
On top of that, I'd argue that steering Facebook and Google in those directions is exactly what their executives and their customers want.
Very clear the market has now negatively reacted to high operating expenses that largely stem from excessive headcount.
Most companies will likely not reduce pay if they can help it to maintain competitiveness, but if you’re a bottom or middle performer or on a non-revenue generating team suddenly your job security even at “safe” companies like Google is at risk.
Reducing staff by ~10% or whatever after doubling it in the last couple years isn't exactly a strong signal of anything.
Point is tech companies are highly sensitive to interest rates and now have to course correct in a world where the market is punishing excessive spending.
Now, if you have really in-demand skills / experience that may not matter much. But companies are slamming on the breaks. If I was laid off tomorrow I'd expect it to take twice as long to find a job as it would've at the end of 2021 or early this year. Not "there aren't any jobs" but I wouldn't consider this a "hot" market for the majority of roles.
I honestly don't think there are that many remote jobs available that pay at the FAANG level, outside of FAANG companies, that is. Unless one goes into consulting, which comes with its own risks even during a non-turbulent and recession-proof market, which most definitely we don't have right now.
You'd be surprised :). Even Amazon isn't eating up engineers like it was a year ago.
No, there is no hot job market, unless you want to take 30-40% pay cut.
Its a pretty good deal to suggest to employees that they find a new team rather than performing a layoff, I wouldn't be surprised if the profitable/successful teams can still add head count for people they like.
I mean from the article it’s pretty clear giving employees a month to find a new job internally is more like Hunger Games than some guarantee you will be successful. It sounds like a way for companies to not have to admit they are doing layoffs.
Are you saying that because stock prices are dropping that the market has reacted to excessive headcount?
Cause I think a better explanation for that, is that in the past 2 years we've had inflation, and that was reflected in the profits of the companies for 2020-21, and now that the fed is lowering interest rates, we're expecting that inflation to stop, and so that's affecting the stock market.
This seems to have very little to do with these companies business models, and everything to do with them failing to recognize that their profit changes are readily explained by inflation/deflation. Which seems to be a better explanation of what the markets are reacting to.
What if the market goes up and stays up? Fed does or doesnt hike rates? Do you really want to play hiring catch up when everyone else has a 2 year head start?
Also, your board of directors doesn't give a shit about the reason, they only care what is being done in response.
In particular, hiring benefits don't take effect immediately, it's going to be a while before productivity is realized from the new hires. So it is very short-sighted to freeze that before an economic downturn, when you want new forms of revenue and innovation to allow you to outlast the competition and grow a business into something that will become the "next big thing".
Also, as a commentary, it makes it more clear that your stock is actually stable, because the only thing that's really changed is inflation and catch up to reality from the fed turning off the money hose.
Apart from Search and AdSense, What team at Google isn't a non-revenue generating team?
Maybe they are not strictly black in the P&L sense, but they are strategic revenue-generating business priorities.
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.
My three would be:
1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA.
2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee treatment (or others, within some notion of reasonableness*), make this metric public, provide some sort of accounting and accountability for it, and let shareholders adjust accordingly.
3. The quarterly reporting of public companies. This makes long-term planning and investment much harder.
* I haven't studied this very broadly. I'm familiar with the Triple Bottom Line and B-Corporations.
> Meta, as of last year the name of Facebook’s parent company, has long had a practice that employees whose roles are eliminated are subject to termination if they can’t find a new job internally within a month. Many other companies also make efforts to reassign employees whose groups are closed or restructured. At Meta historically, it was usually only employees deemed undesirable who failed to land new positions. Now, affected employees and managers say, workers with good reputations and strong performance reviews are being pushed out on a regular basis.
This sounds like a recipe for achieving rock-bottom morale of the remaining employees at warp speed. If anything, it seems worse than just firing people. By shunting high performers into the traditional dead-end path, the company simultaneously calls the employee's reputation into question while placing their professional short-term future in limbo.
Why not just fire?
My company is being eaten again by another company that makes them a market leader and rather than compete for a new job in a much bigger tech department, I’m taking my stack of cash and finishing my engineering degree of which I have about 75 applicable credits toward. Fuck “development” as a career, that’s just a toolset now.
I’m still sticking around the old gig to support the legacy systems for 10 hours a week and keeping the channel open for the future, but I’m gonna sit back and watch the industry smolder for a bit.
The prospect of interviewing for a development job makes me shudder.
Looks like Google's limit would be 499 laid off per office. I wonder if "Remote" counts as one office location or not, and what timeframe is used to aggregate layoff events for purposes of compliance with this law. Could Google lay off 499 workers in separate layoffs happening weekly or daily?
Now that hiring has cooled they are willing to drop those folks.
But is it true? Has this ever been confirmed by an insider or ex-People Ops there?
A goal of 10% sounds like vitality curve/rank and yank/stacked ranking.
If 10% of employees get promoted at the same you will know.
What is this?
is this the new way to say "fired"?
>A Google spokesman said almost 95% of employees who expressed interest in staying with the company found new roles within the notice period. Alphabet had 174,014 employees at the end of the second quarter, up 20.8% from the previous year.
Or better yet, give them hope, then take it away
Based on the quote below, it doesn't seem like they are actually being fired:
>A Google spokesman said almost 95% of employees who expressed interest in staying with the company found new roles within the notice period.
I mean it is cheap comparing to Google/Meta, but again, in a much changed environment that is still better than not being hired at all I guess.
Don't let yourself be fooled into a false sense of confidence, you'd really need to test the process out to see if it yields an offer!
And yeah, if you are top, top egghead talent it's possible there is always at job for you at Meta. It might just save that recruiters job if they source you and you pan out.
Think about it like this: earlier this year the bar to get an offer was that you need to be hot, like a 6/10 before. In this new climate, you need to be more like a 9.5/10 to make it through their little hiring game.
With that said..
Don't let some random on the Internet stop or discourage you; go get that job if you are up to the task and actually want to work at Meta! Have fun.. yeah.
My original comment was more about the non-Bigco job postings, a lot of times they may just be testing the waters to see what they can dredge up. If it looks appealing, they might bite. It's mostly a huge waste of time for the poor candidates, though.
Isn't this the main reason why this "frugality excercise" is being held, and unnecessary stress generated? Sounds like a major VP+ screwup. I hope that layer will answer.
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but this mess seems orchestrated. Or simply CEOs trying to keep the feature parity at the HR level...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation#United_State...
I don’t think it applies to FAANG.